For the past eight years, visitors to the downtown Seattle Art Museum have been greeted by nine white Ford Taurus cars that hang from the ceiling of SAM’s expansive main lobby.

“I noticed them before I even walked into the building,” says Zach, a visitor from Maryland. “It’s like cars are exploding, right?”

The cars are an artwork called “Inopportune: Stage One,” created by Chinese contemporary artist Cai Guo-Qiang.

Each car is fitted with a halo of small colored lights that flash and wink in a sequence that moves from one car to the next. It looks a little bit like fireworks.

That makes sense: The artist is a pyrotechnics aficionado who helped design the fireworks displays for the opening ceremony at the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

“Inopportune: Stage One” has been on display since the museum opened this building addition. But now officials say it’s time for the artwork to come down.

SAM’s curator of modern and contemporary art, Catharina Manchanda, says the installation was never intended to be up for more than two or three years.

“We’ve had a few electrical issues,” she explains. “Some of the parts have to be refurbished, so it’s a good time to take the cars down and give them a good look-over.”

While not everyone likes the installation (The Stranger’s art critic Jen Graves recently called it “one of the worst-installed art juggernauts” she’d ever seen), many museum-goers have found it surprising and delightful.

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A dancer stands alone on the stage. He is dressed in black tights only; his bare chest is broad and muscular.

As the bassoonist plays the first plaintive notes of Igor Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring,” the lights come up and the dancer’s body undulates like a stalk of wheat in the wind. Slowly, he lifts his shoulders, and his extended arms drift up like wings of a bird.

It was the Northwest’s most notorious kidnapping case. Little George Weyerhaeuser had been snatched off the streets of Tacoma and held for $200,000 ransom.

Eighty years later, Weyerhaeuser, the timber titan, told me he hadn’t read much news coverage about his kidnapping.

He has a vivid memory of those eight days, he said, but he hadn’t dug through those old stories from 1935. He was 9 at the time, after all, and his parents wanted to leave the kidnapping in the past. They wanted him to grow up without this traumatic event hanging over his life.

William Kerby was exposed to repeated blasts when he was deployed to Iraq as a Marine infantryman.

“For instance, we were setting off a charge on a door or a gate to blow it open, and there’s nowhere really to go, so you basically turn away from it within a few feet,” Kerby said. “You can feel that kind of concussion, that shockwave, as it goes through your body.”